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People will love it if they like that sort of thing, even if it's not even the best example of it. But if you're tired of everything about the setup and execution of romcoms then strictly avoid. The worst thing about this show is that it was made in 2017 but feels much older in how regressive it is.
Candy is here in all her incompetent, self-absorbed, whiny victimhood and she falls for Chaebol in all his asshole finery. Candy is a nutritionist, not like that matters either to her or anyone else. Especially not to the writer who seems to have only a vague notion of what nutritionists do for a living. It's just a new way to throw her in the path of Chaebol, with whom she shared a (naturally drunken) one night stand three years before. Can't have anyone thinking she's a slut by letting her choose to sleep with a guy when she's sober.
At the beginning of the show, there was quite a nice connection between these two characters. Both were incompetent losers even if one of them was a rich one. But when the show shifted forward three years, any goodwill from their initial interactions was quickly lost as he uses his position of authority to bully her and she acts like both a martyr and an idiot about it - not necessarily in that order. Episode after episode involved him ordering her to bring him food and then either abusing, insulting or harassing her when she did. She endured, as Candy does, and still liked him even after all of this. Dude must have been amazing in the sack. That's the only explanation.
There's a second female lead in this. I don't even need to tell you about her - you already know. Get a life, old-school second female leads. You're pathetic. There's a thing called feminism. It's well over 100 years old. You might have heard about it. It'll help.
There's also a second male lead. You've met him too. He's perfect and in love with the female lead but at least he never Nice Guys her so he has that going for him. He deserved to be in a better show.
While Asshole Chaebol at least retains a core of vulnerability that allows you to keep some sympathy for him as a character, Candy is endlessly self-absorbed and wedded to victimhood, especially around her mother and the dreaded S.E.X. on account of being a good girl and not one of those sluts.
One of the show's biggest fakeouts revolves around Candy's little brother whom she treats as a burden and refers to as "her dog" so people won't discover the scandalous fact that he exists. These are not her finest moments in a show filled with extremely poor behaviour on her part. One of my chief gripes about romcoms is that they only include sex if they want to do a pregnancy fakeout. I was willing to give the show credit for not going there except - oh no, it went there! Not only did it include it but it executed it in the most annoying, most sexist, and most horrible way possible.
Basically, this show is a quintessential old-school Korean romcom dripping with sexism and misogynism, double standards, nun/whore dichotomies and a female lead who is as annoying as she is useless. Her actions especially in the final episode are teeth grindingly annoying.
Some people who love this kind of thing will no doubt be annoyed by how much I hated this show. I just think it's a shame that shows like this are still being made.
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As far as the genre goes, Search is a pretty good example with excellent performances by the wonderful Jang Dong Yoon as the military dog handler Yong Dong Jin and a strangely (but welcomingly) sombre and cerebral Krystal as the military forensic scientist, Son Ye Rim.
The two used to date - a fact that is utterly superfluous to the plot and could have been jettisoned without us noticing - but end up in a joint operation in the demilitarized zone after there are reports of a disease spreading in the area. Jang Dong Yoon is an amazing up and coming actor who clearly wanted to branch out after his two previous roles (both performances of which were extraordinary) and does very well with the role. Krystal is also good in a natural and understated performance with none of the apparent "I am acting!" quirks and ticks that a lot of Idols seem to pick up.
While the show benefited both from being only 10 episodes and from good casting, direction and production, the script suffered from some usual OCN weaknesses. There was a lot of people in uniforms and identical haircuts running around shooting at each other in the dark and one day somebody will learn this is NOT good television. A lot of good character beats were introduced and then forgotten, like a Chekhov's gun that did not go off (why DID Ye Rim suddenly and unexpectedly break up with Dong Yoon a year ago? And if it's not important why dwell on it so much?). And some of the editing seemed more about fooling the audience or confusing them with time jumps than anything else.
The final episode was unfortunately utterly ridiculous. And while the show successfully walked that fine line between our suspension of disbelief and falling off a cliff for most of its run, it leapt into the chasm at a full jump in episode 10.
So while I enjoyed watching Search quite a lot, I can't declare it great television. But for a bit of mindless fun and quite a good example of a classic OCN drama, it's worth a binge.
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A tight 13 episodes, intricately and perfectly plotted, the show has lovely performances by Alice Ke and Greg (Han) Hsu, a great soundtrack and a fascinating twisty-turny plotline. A love story between Huang Yu Xuan (Alice Ke) and Wang Quan Sheng (Greg Hsu) across space, time and reality, Someday or One Day might be a time travel drama or a parallel universe drama or a doppelganger drama (or possibly all three). For me to outline the plot would be for me to spoil the plot. And that says something about just how ambiguous and enigmatic the show is.
It’s rare for a show with a supernatural element to be so real, so emotional and so raw but Someday or One Day is as heartwrenching and bittersweet as it is intelligent and challenging. It will have you speculating wildly and attempting to puzzle out its mysteries, while agonising with its characters and feeling their every pang of love, pain, loss, grief, confusion and joy. Someday or One Day manages to be complex and intriguing while never compromising on the very real human emotions being experienced by the characters. Verisimilitude within the magical is almost impossible to adequately capture and yet these writers have done it.
In the midst of the unreal, these people feel real. And they feel real in a way that is truly raw and truly human.
While it's far too early to declare this the best show of 2020, I am anyway. It was almost perfect.
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My Engineer is the new SOTUS ripoff we never needed. Senior engineering student Bohn (a much less green Cooper in his first lead since My Bromance) bullies freshman medical student, Duen (Poy) by making him bring him a rose every day. The couple fall for each other and embark on a relationship that is half weirdly sexless, half abusive.
As well as Duen being exceedingly weird about any kind of skinship to the point where it's uncomfortable, Bohn freaks out almost every episode at Duen even talking to another man and then gaslights him into apologising when he's in the wrong. Think Until We Meet Again meets 2 Moons. Yes it's that weird. If Duen isn't freaking out because his boyfriend wants to spend time with him alone, Bohn is freaking out because Duen interacts with other people. Duen responds to all of this with a weird vacant smile that makes you wonder if he's mentally deficient in some way.
Of course all their close group of friends are also secretly gay and we end up with a number of other romances between them. The best of these is RamKing (Perth and Lay), whose relationship is almost worth tuning in for. The worst of these is BossMek, where Ryan's character Mek eventually gets his straight friend, Boss (Inntouch) by aggressively Nice Guying him in a way that feels coercive.
The show is predictable, generic and derivative. It has almost no plot and is written to a standard BL formula. For me at least that formula is tired. If you wanted to fast forward entirely to the RamKing scenes, you wouldn't be missing anything. Or just skip it completely.
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When it started, WhyRU had an air of meta brilliance. But whether due to bad writing, poor planning, or the Covid19 shutdown, it became instead an inconsistent tonal mess that isn't really about anything. I don't know what Why RU is or is trying to be. I don't think the writers and producers do either.
At the beginning, the story - about a University student, Zon, with a Fujoshi sister who believes himself cursed into a BL novel - danced on the edge of brilliance every episode but never quite made it. As a concept, the idea of him finding himself stuck living tropes and cliches from a BL novel had a lot of scope for humour. It meant the show could provide an old-school cliched BL love story while simultaneously parodying exactly that. And yet the show never quite nails it; being often slightly too serious about all its tropes for its own good. At its best, Why RU is like an over-the-top BL pastiche that will make you laugh out loud. At its worst, it degenerates into the genre it was supposed to be parodying.
And while the core relationships that underpin it are quite good - no harassment, stalking, assault or sexual violence and the two couples talk to each other and seem to genuinely like each other - the two clash tonally in a way that embodies the drama's tonal problem overall. Fight and Tutor's romance doesn't just seem to be happening in a different show - it's almost happening in a different Universe. One that really really wants us to visit Thailand's beaches.
Is Why RU a BL parody? An homage? Or just another standard show in a market that's close to saturation point?
It does help that the show is anchored by two strong young actors - Saint and Tommy - who can somewhat make up for the clunky and green performances of the other leads. Zon's increasingly funny freakouts as he tries to avoid being forced into BL scenarios with his designated love interest, Saifah, are by far the show's best aspect but these are jettisoned quickly in lieu of a standard Yaoi romance, albeit a super-cute one and a super-sexy one.
While a great deal of laughs can be had by e.g. a confused TharnType wandering through and monologuing randomly to the camera at one point or Zon exclaiming that Saint's character, Tutor, "isn't himself", the premise is never quite milked for the humour it could provide. The show never entirely commits to its premise and instead starts churning out a standard University BL instead.
Whether because of Covid or because the writers didn't really know what they wanted this show to be, the back half is a yawn fest with the thinnest of plots that culminates in a final episode that will leave you scratching your head as to what the show's plot even was. Other than an excuse to have cute boys make out in exotic locales.
It's a shame because this could have been very funny, very self-aware and delightfully meta BL.
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This is a fantastic romp story about con artist, Yang Jung-gook (the always-fun Choi Siwon) who is married to badass detective, Kim Mi-young (the always-excellent Lee Yoo Young).
Yang Jung-gook's marriage is failing because of the Very Big Lie rotting at the core of their relationship. Both parties are holding on because of their genuine love for each other, but it seems as though their marriage won't last either way. Yang Jung-gook's plan is retirement; the perfect way to leave the life of crime behind him and turn his lies into truth.
The most-recent snag in his retirement plan is loan shark, Park Hoo-Ja (Kim Min-Jung, in the performance of her career), who blackmails him into running for the Assembly. Hoo-ja has big plans for her father's company - most of which involve her taking control of it despite competition from her older Unni, #1, who is in jail (Hoo-ja is the fourth of five daughters).
The premise of a con artist married to a cop was enough for me to press play on this show. Add in the potential romp-factor of him conning his way into politics and I was always going to watch. Amazingly, the whole thing is as fun as it sounds. From the first frame, this show is fast-paced, witty, well-plotted, well-characterised, fantastically acted and just a whole heap of damn fun.
While everyone's performances are top-notch, Kim Min-Jung's brilliant, impatient, entitled, loan shark steals the show. By the end, you're not just hoping that Jung-gook wins, you're hoping Hoo-ja does as well. Her battle against Unni #1 mirrors Jung-gook's battle against political corruption to the extent that you're almost sad that she has to lose in order for him to win. This is really an amazing performance by an actor who was always good but never stood out to me before.
The cinematography, editing and music are original and enjoyable and the show almost entirely avoids tired tropes from any genre. At 18 episodes (36 half hours), you would expect the pacing or plotting to suffer but it never does. It's unflaggingly good from beginning to end.
But what makes My Fellow Citizens so completely satisfying is the inherent sense of justice that underpins the show. This show has a story to tell and a message it wants to convey and it's not afraid to do it. This is as much a show about the corrupting power of greed as it is anything else. It's also a show that never lets a character - whether it's a flawed hero or a beloved villain - get a pass for their actions.
It really is one of my new favourites and I wish it had gotten more love while it aired.
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I really hope there's a season 2 but even if there isn't this was still pretty much the most perfect short drama I've ever seen.
10/10
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This review may contain spoilers
A bemusing set of contrasts, Castaway Diva will stun you with its premiere episodes outlining a beautifully tragic backstory of crushed adolescent dreams and then launching into a headscratching modern day tale of.... I don't even know.What was Castaway Diva ultimately about?
Seo Mok Ha (an always class act, Park Eun Bin), is an aspiring singer who longs to follow in the footsteps of Diva, Yoon Ran Joo (Kim Hyo Jin). Running away from an abusive father with the help of fellow classmate Kiho, she ends up stranded on a deserted island for 15 years. Improbable, maybe. But as a metaphor for having your early dreams slip away from you due to tragic, uncontrollable circumstance, it was pretty good. The show had shades of the delightful Thirty But Seventeen.
Fifteen years later, Mok Ha is rescued and tries to revive the career she aspired to while reconnecting with the loyal and generous Kiho.
Except that isn't what Castaway Diva is really about at all. Instead, the show veers off endlessly into the mid-career travails of the fading Ran Joo who isn't as successful as she'd hoped and is struggling with a disloyal agency and nodes. The idea this could somehow equate to 15 years on a deserted island alone after burying your abusive father is outright bonkers. The parallels between these two concepts - the literal and figurative isolation of obscurity for an idol - seems to be what this writer is trying to make and it's frankly gross. Ran Joo comes off as spoilt and entitled and narcissistic and Mok Ha gets dragged into outright fraud in trying to support her idol.
Kiho meanwhile is stranded on his own figurative island (or something) but the connections between these three 'castaway' plotlines is tenuous at best and, in the case of Ran Joo, borderline offensive.
The show is beautiful at several points and the casting is excellent. But the music, like most idol music dramas, is overproduced and often generic. PEB has several laughable moments with her guitar singing solo where the music is so overproduced that you can barely hear her real voice at all. The child actor in comparison had some real moments where you believed she was a raw talent. The rest of the music, apart from a few exceptions, is typically banal.
With an absolutely brilliant opening two episodes and a slow descent into the tedious, Castaway Diva truly is from the sublime to the ridiculous in one show.
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While there are still six months to go, the bar has been set extremely high with Abyss: a giant mess acted by a cast who really deserved better.
The annoying thing is, like last year's Worst Show of The Year (About Time), Abyss could have been fantastic. It has a great premise, a decent cast. It could have been an hilarious - almost farcical - comedy of mistaken identities, body swapping, and annoyed aliens. Instead what we got was a turgid, unfunny mess underpinned by a philosophy that was at times confused and at others actively offensive.
Ahn Hyo-seop has a lot of potential as an actor but he is still far too green to be given a leading role. With a good director, a good script and a good female lead he could have still produced something decent. But unfortunately he only got one of those in a criminally-underutilized Park Bo-young, - who really deserved better in her first lead show since the (sometimes equally as offensive) Strong Woman Do Bong-soon.
Both the lead roles were poorly written, with Ahn Hyo-seop's Cha Min changing from scene to scene depending on what the writer needed him to do - at times an uber genius, at others the dumbest male lead to ever appear on screen. Park Bo-young was given so little to work with for her character, Go Se-yeon, that she opted for cute - an interpretation that did not work with the character or the script.
Both these characters die and are brought back to life by a glowing alien marble. The unattractive Cha Min is suddenly gorgeous, while the stunning, willowy, Go Se-yeon is... Park Bo-young. Which is to say, she's a super adorable tiny person so the idea she's now "plain" is just ridiculous.
From beginning to end, Abyss had some profound things to say about image in our beauty-obsessed culture.
Like:
“you can’t love someone who’s ugly”
"what you look like is what your soul is like"
“plastic surgery gives you a better soul” and
“dieting makes your wedding day better”
Apart from the dumb, messy plot, the poor characterisation and the wall-to-wall stupidity of the characters, it's ultimately this utterly shallow and almost vacuous underpinning philosophy that makes Abyss truly awful.
Appearance is everything. Nothing else matters.
No thanks, Abyss. No thanks.
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Meng Shao Fei (Jake Hsu) is a cop who has spent the last four years chasing gangster Tang Yi (Chris Wu). Tang Yi is trying to go straight to fulfil his late mentor/ father figure’s wishes. While he seems to be in charge of his organisation, there are rumours that not everybody is happy. However, Meng Shao Fei doesn’t seem that interested in Tang Yi’s criminal activities: he mostly wants to know what happened during an incident four years previously when his Sunbae was killed. After playing a cat and mouse game for four years, Meng Shao Fei and Tang Yi are probably too aware of each other for their own good. So when fate throws them together a few times, sparks fly.
As a BL premise, this a pretty good one. Meng Shao Fei’s dogged – almost obsessive – pursuit of Tang Yi translates pretty well as an analogy for a romantic pursuit. Whether Shao Fei wants justice, the truth, or Tang Yi’s hot bod is something even he seems confused about from early on. It shows a laudable kind of emotional honesty that, when Shao Fei finally realises his feelings, he pursues them with the same persistence with which he pursued the original case. He will get his man, it seems, even if he’s been in denial as to what he wants him for. After all, he’s a cop and Tang Yi is a gangster.
And therein, unfortunately, lies the show's problem. The writers simply don't understand the action genre and are not capable of grappling with the ethical issues at the heart of this relationship. From the beginning, the characters seem to be pasted in from a different show; one where cops are adorable and incompetent and nobody cares that one of them has completely compromised all their unit's ongoing investigations. The action elements are not used well or written well and the writers clearly struggle with a genre they don't know how to write.
It says something about the HIStory series that I stayed shipping the main couple even as it became clear that their relationship would not work (in the real world, this of course is a clear fiction). There is a lot of chemistry here - so much so the writers copped an unfortunate amount of flak over skipping a scene where that chemistry... culminated (and then quickly threw their audience a bone - literally as it turns out).
I can admire the writers' ambition as they try to write a much-longer series in a genre they're unfamiliar with. But, unfortunately, their execution has failed to match that ambition even if the series still produces consistently-good BL stories that are far above anything else on offer today.
By all means watch and enjoy but temper your expectations about the show's plotting. It does fall short.
Watch it for the romance instead.
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It makes it even more astonishing, more powerful and more welcome that Korea has made Mad For Each Other: a story about two traumatised people trying to navigate their way back into the world and into a relationship with each other.
Jung Woo plays Noh Hwi-oh, a cop with an anger management problem on suspension. His neighbour and partner in therapy is Lee Min-kyung (Oh Yeon-seo) who is suffering from paranoia, OCD and other post-traumatic symptoms after coming out of a violent relationship.
Mad For Each Other is written and structured more like a classic American sitcom than a kdrama. It episodes are a short 30 minutes and the scenes are short, snappy and the camera never lingers or settles. And yet, while it's a fast paced situational dramedy, the writing has genuine pathos, heart and depth. It's a tragi-comedy that treats all its characters with respect and empathy and never opts for a cliche. Its treatment of mental illness is never trite and, while exaggerated, never farcical.
The production values are high, the acting is excellent and the show never makes its damaged characters the butt of its jokes.
And while I would love to be awarding it the 10/10 it almost attained, the final episode couldn't help itself in opting for some unnecessary action to resolve what should have been resolved with the more subtle character-driven plotting it had until the end. But for being almost perfect, I highly recommend this show.
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Despite vowing not to touch any more Thai BL after the unfolding disaster that was this year, I nonetheless pressed play on TharnType: 7 Years of Dysfunction (sorry, love) and here I am. I know this is the review you have all been waiting for.
Well, it's been seven years since Tharn and Type got together and refused to deal with any of their internal relationship issues. So here we are, kind of tired and muted and a bit sad after seven years of Tharn avoiding conflict because of his fear of rejection and Type being publicly in the closet because he refuses to admit he's gay. The two do nothing but bottle things up, have a kind of passive-aggressive fight and then have sexy times to cover the cracks. I suspect as viewers we're just supposed to enjoy the sexy times and not notice that this relationship is terrible. But it is. It's terrible. I desperately want both of them to break up and go find somebody else better suited to them. Or at least FINALLY deal with the issues in their relationship. Also, Tharn has these moments where he's absolutely f'ing creepy to younger gay men and it only reminds me that he was abused as an adolescent and nobody is doing anything about it. His abuser is practically living at his family's house. But at least he's no longer dating a literal child.
So it's seven years later and Type is struggling at work in probably the only plotline that is possibly about something (there IS a big difference between studying and working and dealing with workplace nonsense can be exhausting). And I'll expand on the implied point here - there is literally nothing else in this drama so far that is about anything. There is no plot. At all. The show is lacklustre and paint by numbers. Even the shoe-horned soft-core porn I'm supposed to be distracted by is phoned in. They devoted actual screentime to Type being jealous over a woman despite his boyfriend being completely 100% gay. And if I touched on the screaming misoygnism of that whole plotline I'd be here all week.
Tharn wants to get married because he think that means that Type will be his possession and can therefore NEVER LEAVE (marriage doesn't work like this, my damaged friend) and Type doesn't want to get married because if he marries a man he might have to admit he's gay and we can't have that because this is Thai BL and we all know GAY IS BAD. And of course you'll remember show completely glossed over this conflict at multiple points even though it's the main one. Possibly if Tharn needs constant emotional reassurance he shouldn't have spent seven years with a man who's already married to his closet and again - these two are TERRIBLE for each other. Break up! Do better. I get it, you love each other. It's not enough!
Since this show is unlikely to be about these two actually working out any of these issues but will inevitably find an external conflict for them to pretend they're a rock under siege then I should bow out now. But if I did then how could I reliably report back that TharnType is a bad show about a dysfunctional couple and you shouldn't bother getting invested.
This has been my much-anticipated review of TharnType: 7 Years of Ignoring All Our Real Issues.
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So it seems strange to write a review about his latest work and say that, while it no less beautiful or artful or well-framed, it's use of music is ear-screechingly bad and its portrayal of women's lives depressing. In fact, this is the most depressing Korean drama I've seen since Misty told us a woman can only have success if she destroys men - and she won't be happy anyway when she does it.
Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with the writing, acting or cinematography of this show. It is, in fact, a warm and often-visually beautiful representation of the ordinary life of a very ordinary noona and her very ordinary romance with her friend's dongsaeng. But it is in the show's realism that it fails.
Jin-ah (Son Ye-jin) is the most everywoman portrayed on TV: told her job is to compromise, to keep the peace, to slide through without conflict. Basically raised to be this way and then simultaneously judged for being this way. Forced to be a participant, essentially, in her own mistreatment. In the end, Jin-ah will only be happy, and the people around her will only be happy, if she stops trying to make everyone happy. She's such an everywoman that I don't know why the writers and the PD told the story at all - unless it's to completely depress us as to the current state of feminism.
For those who want a fluffy, happy romance this is the wrong show, even if there's a lot of that in the first half. Love it seems can survive in a bubble but can't survive the real world, even if the two people in the romance are not doing anything wrong.
In the end, this show gets a seven because it was a very good piece of television despite the depressing overall theme. The one true flaw was the OST, which was so awful it had me muting the soundtrack throughout. If you told me a few weeks ago that I'd be muting the soundtrack in a PD Ahn drama, I wouldn't have believed you. But here I am. And if I have to hear 'Stand By Your Man' one more time, it will be one time too many.
Sometimes it is hard to be a woman. But only if you are brought up to embrace noble martyrdom as a woman's main role. It is ironic perhaps that the people who will truly hate this show are the ones who love shows that promote woman's noble martyrdom as a virtue to be rewarded - like Mischievous Kiss. And while there is a lesson in that for women, it's not a particularly uplifting one.
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This review may contain spoilers
There was a point during Misty's run that it was shaping up to be 2018's Forest of Secrets. An intelligent script, excellent acting, striking cinematography and a haunting, beautiful score all combine into a compelling piece of television about a powerful woman trying to attain her goals in a hyper-patriarchal society: all the while rocking awesome pantsuits and never letting the cracks in her life show in public. Dark, mature and atmospheric with a powerful female lead, this show was amazing until the inevitable Episode 15 slide in quality that condemns it to being ALMOST the best show of 2018.Go Hye Ran has hit the glass ceiling but instead of quietly disappearing like older women are supposed to, she refuses to go anywhere. Fighting constantly against corruption, discrimination and vicious gossip, she has become cold, driven and untrusting but is fuelled by a strong desire for justice and a determination to win against all odds.
Kim Nam Joo puts in an exceptional performance as the complex, brilliant and uncompromising Go Hye Ran who is charged for a murder and represented by her lawyer husband, Kang Tae Wook (Ji Jin Hee). The rest of the cast also do superb jobs. Full of timeline holes, unreliable narrators, unlikeable characters and deliberate misdirections, this show will have you second-guessing everything you think you know about the characters to the last scene.
Which brings us to the ending...
Like a lot of people, I was very dissatisfied with the ending and found the finale overly-long and self-indulgent. As can sometimes happen, what I thought was the main point of the drama and what the writers thought was the main point of the drama diverged wildly around the end of episode 14. As such, I found the last episodes frustrating, watching time tick down to a finale that I knew wasn't going to contain resolution to the plotlines I cared about. The ending in particular I found depressing in a way the rest of the drama - however moody and dark - wasn't.
Textually, in terms of the shows themes, I personally found the ending contradicted what (I thought) was the point of the show as a whole. In that respect, it negated to an extent the show's message. It is this - the negation of the show's underlying point and a resolution that is ultimately depressing - that makes the ending so bad.
However despite my frustration with the ending, this was a very good piece of television overall.
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This review may contain spoilers
The second instalment of HIStory3 for this year is a regressive detour into fan service that has neither the coherence nor the charm of previous storylines.One thing I usually say about the HIStory series is that it does good queer stories even if it doesn't do other things right. But Make Our Days Count is not working for me at all. Which is a shame because I was looking forward to it a great deal. However nothing can hide the fact the show is badly written, poorly characterised and has nothing to say.
This story about popular and oblivious Xiang Hao Ting who falls for the studious and impoverished highschool student, Yu Xi Gu, (whom he used to bully) seems regressive - annoyingly so. HIStory1 was little but cliched Fujoshi baiting and I have been enjoying how the series has been maturing and evolving through HIStory2 and then HIStory3: Trapped, which for all its many many many many flaws was ambitious storytelling with mature leads.
Not that my issue is with the highschool setting itself but with the awful seme-uke "gay for you" nature of the main relationship and its associated stalking, harassment and abuse. I felt like the first few episodes were basically a relationship post on the "Am I The Asshole" reddit (with the overwhelming responses agreeing that yes, you are the asshole).
I feel so sorry for Xi Gu who just wants to work and study and has this succession of classmates harass, bully, assault, stalk, abuse and finally sexually harass him. Also I have no idea when or why our male lead suddenly decided he liked him; the switch happened suddenly and without much preamble. The romance essentially came out of nowhere and, while I could believe that Meng Shao Fei's pursuit of Tang Yi could easily become a romantic pursuit, a bully swapping relentless harassment for wooing does not work as well. It's no surprise that Xi Gu assumes that the sudden sexual element to the harassment is merely a new ploy by the boy who has been torturing him.
Of course the other relationship is just as bad, with an older man, Lu Zhi Gang, dating a highschool student, Sun Bo Xiang . One particularly revealing (and slightly gross conversation) involves the older man denying he has a romantic interest in Xi Gu because he's far far too young - despite him being the exact age as his boyfriend. No one - even the writers who put that dialogue on the page - seem to have noticed the problem here. Bo Xiang (played with a great deal of charm and nuance by Wilson Lui, who impresses me weekly) is a physical and emotional child, treated frequently like a toddler by his so-called boyfriend . To make the whole thing worse, the writers inserted an unnecessarily graphic sex scene (unprotected sex, even!) between the two of them that, again, felt like fan service rather than a genuine narrative development.
I could argue that the relationship in HIStory2: Right or Wrong was equally as disturbing but there I felt like the show was saying something and had put some thought into the characters and the relationship. The whole thing was both wrong but also quite romantic and it was up to the audience to work out where the line was and whether they were fine with it or not.
I honestly feel like this iteration of HIStory3 was written to a formula containing things people liked about previous HIStory stories and BL generally. They don't have anything to say, they just pulled elements together as fan service. There is nothing that subtle or interesting about it. It's a copy and paste job that celebrates the worst of BL while romanticising harassment.
Worse than that, "gay for you" as a plot device has a tendency to whitewash homosexuality out of the picture, something that's both ironic and frustrating in a series that's supposed to be dedicated to queer romance stories. Writing gay love stories without the gay may be a standard element of Yaoi but that doesn't mean we're not supposed to be evolving past that. And this is where I see this series as mere Fujoshi baiting. And that is a depressingly regressive move from these particular writers.
The ending
This review has been updated following the final episode to make a spoiler-free comment about the ending. It kind of goes like this: OMFG!! No, just no. Watching this show is like watching someone dig a hole and every time you think it's as deep as it can go it turns out it can plumb new depths. Even people who liked this terrible drama hated this ending. Ponder that one for a moment.
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